420 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
foundation of scientific facts. Lavoisier, perhaps, deserves the greatest credit in 
this matter, while the labors of the other great chemists of the eighteenth and the 
beginning of the nineteenth centuries were in a great measure directed to the 
analysis of every conceivable material, whether solid, liquid, or gaseous. These 
have resulted in the table of so-called elements, now nearly seventy in number, 
to which fresh additions are constantly being made. 
Of this ever-growing list of elements not one has been resolved into simpler 
bodies for three-quarters of a century; and we, who are removed by two or three 
generations from the great builders of our science, are tempted to look upon 
these bodies as though they were really simple forms of matter, not only unre- 
solved, but unresolvable. The notation we employ favors this view and stamps 
it upon our minds. ^ -^ ^ ^ — Chemical News. 
ARTIFICIAL STONE AS A BUILDING MATERIAL. 
The high antiquity of prehistoric remains is frequently authenticated by the 
presence of the "sun-baked bricks" found among them. The Encyclopczdia Bri- 
tannica , in an article on St. Jean d'Acre (a town and seaport in Syria, and in 
ancient times a place of some celebrity), says: ''Its great antiquity is proved 
by fragments of houses that have been found, consisting of that highly sunburnt 
brick with a mixture of cement and sand, which was only used in erections of 
the remotest ages." 
In Scotland, Ireland, and Wales it has been found that the most durable 
material of those old " castles of the gallant clans" is concrete, in which small 
cobble stones were embedded to form a solid piece of masonry. 
The Moors have left samples of their artificial stone inwrought upon the 
rock of Gibraltar, which have withstood successfully the storms of ten centuries. 
The Colosseum at Rome presents further examples which have nobly resisted the 
tests of time; the cisterns of Solomon, near the city of Tyre, which are of still higher 
antiquity, are almost complete in their preservation; and at Jerusalem there are 
to be seen five immense courses of Cyclopean masonry, the base of the wall 
of the city (now inclosing the Mosque of Omar), supposed to be a remnant of 
the wall of the Temple of Solomon, which, as the record tells us, was " set in its 
place without the noise of the hammer dnd the ax." 
Scientists have suggested that the Pyramids were mainly built of artificial 
blocks, manufactured upon the spot, from the sands of the surrounding plain, by 
some cunning process which has perished with the builders; and travelers have 
claimed that the Diocletian or " Pompey's " Pillar, and the ruins of Baalbec and 
Palmyra, are mainly of artificial stone. Whatever may be said of these, we have 
in the actual measurements of the enigmatical "coffer" in the king's chamber of 
the Great Pyramid indubitable evidence of its original plasticity. In the first place, 
we find it depressed upon all its sides, from the corners toward the center, and 
unequally so. The east side of the coffer has been sadly mutilated by tourists, the 
